


The Creative Type

by telm_393



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Demon True Forms, Gen, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Torture, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-19 23:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17011308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: Michael is a curious thing.





	The Creative Type

**Author's Note:**

  * For [herowndeliverance (atheilen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atheilen/gifts).



> The graphic depictions of violence are connected to the "implied/referenced torture" tag, pretty brief, and not all that gory, but I figured I would tag it to err on the side of caution.

At the beginning of what will become the universe, there are concepts. There is, of course, the beginning. Then there is the end. There is time—future and, after the very first moment of true existence, past. Eternity. There is feeling. There is nothing.

There is life.

And once there is life, there are things. There are atoms, there is atmosphere.

There is space.

And at the very moment the things begin, there are beings, and as more things are created, more beings are made of them. The concepts are the things, the things are the concepts, and the beings are things too.

The very first shape in the universe is the circle.

**o**

The creature that will be Michael is born into an existence necessitated by humanity and founded on numbers. It begins in the place where humans go when their limited reality has been put through the machine of the universe and found wanting.

It is a spindly, sharp-edged thing built of the most fundamental parts of existence. It is made of dying stars and shadows. It is created of fear, horror, cruelty, and a little more love than intended. It is a collection of images of the creatures and plants that have already existed on the thing that is Earth for eons, and only a little of the humans, finally fully formed, that share that planet.

It is made to feed off of evil, to be the opposite of the good creatures, the beautiful ones in the place it will never visit.

It is made with sharp teeth and a taste for suffering.

It is meant to be immutable, a perfect bad thing.

But perfection is only a concept.

**o**

It is aware now, of what it was made for, and it is ready. It will play with the upright things, with their skin and fur and clothes and lives that end. It does not have a life, only an existence, and its existence is to help make an after for those ended lives.

The bad ones.

It spreads its flightless dark wings. It opens every one of its rippling, oozing black eyes wide. It bares its fangs. It stands on its long, thin legs, and it feels. Pain ripples pleasantly around its fragmented body. Purpose pushes its pieces together. Its claws scrape against stones made of forever. It is beckoned forward by a fellow creature with venom at its core and translucent wings that shine in the firelight.

It steps into the flames and says: _hello, world._

**o**

Humanity grows and changes, helped along by the eternal beings that watch, who add their own twist to the proceedings. They tempt and give and take, they play, and humanity grows from the seeds they plant.

Their job is not its job, though. It does not truly grasp how it all works, though it thinks it does, with the basics it has been given: the humans are mostly on their own. The humans are given a world to live in, and concepts, and with them they do what they will.

They create, and they destroy, and it can watch, but mostly it is content with what it already has been told. It knows what it needs to know. It knows all the important things about humans. It knows that the ones it meets are the bad ones. They are bad like it is bad.

Still it begins to begin to wonder, sometimes, how that happens, how a human grows from what it is given into something that is meant to be in the Bad Place or the Good Place.

It sees the lives of the bad ones, impressions in its fields of vision, sees all of their nine dimensions, and it learns what creativity is when it sees the evil things attached to the numbers that the bad humans rack up, and is impressed at their creativity. It wants to be creative too, and that is how it discovers what wanting is.

It learns the numbers, it learns the evil things. It begins to understand plus and minus. It thinks, for a fleeting moment every once in the sneering red moon that rises over the sharp cliffs of the Bad Place, that there is complexity in existence. In humans.

Because even the ones who end up in the Bad Place have pluses in their lives, and though assigning point values is a job for someone else, it watches in fascination as new pluses and minuses come in, as the reasons for human action grow and change, as its own existence evolves with time.

It is immutable.

The universe is not.

**o**

The beings that have existed for almost forever, those of the machine that has indeed existed forever, gave humans the ability to create.

So the humans did, and it finds that if it wants to, if it tries, it can watch, so it does. It watches more closely than anyone else who is not some kind of in charge seems to, watches the humans make things that the machine already had, watches them learn to add and subtract, watches them make things that the machine quietly adds to its own existence, or things the machine simply does not need. Did not need. Did not want. Like ways to keep from being bored. Like ways to keep from dying, the human trait that made it of use. Without humans, it would not exist. It thinks of that sometimes. It thinks about that all the time.

The Bad Place plays on the things that they did not need. As humans create, the architects find more ways to hurt them, more ways to delight in the pain they were made for.

It is going to be an architect, it decides very, very early on, because it is not aware that it does not know everything, and so is not aware that it is not made to decide on things. But it does, and so the future is made.

It is forever fascinated by the universe that surrounds it, because it has eternity to learn, even though it is not even old enough to be an apprentice yet.

It is not too thoughtful, though. It is not made to be. It mostly pays attention to the bad things, or the things that become bad, because that is how it can be content. That is how it is meant to be. It is a happy thing because it is a bad thing. Humans are of little use except to hurt, and that is a fact. The Good Place is silly in its naïve belief that there is any worth to humanity.

That is a fact.

Humans are playthings, bodies to torture, and anything about them that in life meant something, which was nothing, ceases after death.

That is a fact.

**o**

Thousands of years loop and swirl and rush past. Humans, who are stupid, stupid, stupid, only understand bits and pieces of the machine, and kill each other over it. New pluses and minuses roll in.

It will be an architect, not because that is what it was made to be, but because it wants to create. Not because humans do.  Just because it likes interesting things.

Neighborhoods are the most interesting things. They are not empty like so much of the Bad Place seems to be. They are created for humans, of humans. They are not things that just exist, they must be made. It likes making. Its favorite thing is carving with its claws, carving pictures it imagines on every surface it can reach. The pictures are reproductions. It will not understand that it can make new things for a long time yet.

Skin is a good thing to draw on.

It likes the color of blood, likes the way muscles split under its fangs, likes the feeling of when its claws crack bones. It likes the sound of screaming less. The screaming hurts something in it, and the babbling is even worse, the begging, because the bad people speak and it wants to listen, but it knows it shouldn’t.

It problem solves. It takes out the tongues of the bad people first, so it won’t have to hear them, so it won’t have to understand. So that it can play without getting distracted. When a ten-headed dog-spider wanders into its enclave, it names the dog-spider Korzoff and lets him eat the tongues, and when Korzoff is eaten by another, bigger dog-spider with only three heads, it misses him, though it already has everything it needs. When it grows up, it will have everything it wants.

Time passes. It grows up, it grows big, claws so long and sharp that it is useless to try to cut into a human with any precision, and it is reduced to ripping them to pieces.

Before it can learn what it is to be dissatisfied, there is a memorandum to announce that it and its contemporaries will choose a human suit. There’s grumbling from its contemporaries, but it is excited, not because it will look like humans but because it will know more of humans. More about what makes them human. More about how to make them suffer, obviously. That is the point. It can’t miss the point.

And maybe this way its claws won’t always be scraping the ground. Maybe this way it will have precision again, control. It likes the idea of being able to use a pen, paper, canvas. And it is close, now, to its job. It will be an architect when it gets its human suit, that is what Shawn said, and it is excited.

It doesn’t have many, many choices for what it is supposed to pretend to become, but it gets one rack of custom suits, and a beat-up book of names. It looks at the suits first.

There are enough choices that it stays a long time, longer than any of its contemporaries.

There is one suit it keeps going back to. It is man-shaped. Older-shaped. Tall-shaped, but not bulky. The suit is white-haired, and the hair is its favorite part, the hair and the height and the long fingers. It chooses that suit, slips it on and zips it up, ignoring the way its body cracks and contracts, the way pieces of it shatter like glass against the soft reproduced skin.

The suit is as wrong and strange as he feels sometimes, and fits poorly.

He’s never going to take it off.

He picks up the book of names with his blunted new hands, flips through it until he gets to a name that gives him pause in so many of its variations.

Mikha’il. Mitxel. Miquel. Miguel. Michel. Mikala. Mykolas. Mihai. Meical. Mícheál. Michael.

Michael, Michael, Michael—

Michael. Translation: _me._


End file.
